What is it?

Dust Runner is a work-in-progress attempt to go where the past meets the future: a Virtual Reality game for Oculus Rift bringing back everyone’s childhood memory: Who would guess a dust particle, a stain on a car window would be the best companion during a long journey?

Skinny

Background

During the weekend of 29-30 August 2015, as Eigen team, we decided to make a “Farewell to Summer” game jam. Dust Runner is the product of this game jam, created during a summer weekend with simple polishing the next day.

Remembering the end of summer brought us childhood memories of long car trips from holiday locations back home. We wanted to recreate the experience of one of the best games made up out of boredom: A dust particle, a piece of dirt, a speckle on the car window gets a life and starts running above the roofs of houses, jumps from the tops of trees, runs along the electricity wires during the journey. Dust Runner is an exclusively VR experience: Bounce your head up and down to position the runner. Stay as long as you can on your make-belief running track to gain energy, and avoid collisions (watch out for those sharp tree tops or spiky roofs! ). For players with profoundly dominant eyes, there is an option of selecting one-eye-only gameplay, while keeping all the game logic of gaze, raycast and collision mechanics intact. See more on the list of technical features we tested/implemented to make that happen.

Media Credits:

What’s next?

This is our first game jam and first VR game, so it does not have many features or good enough graphics etc. yet. We are eager to implement the features and profoundly upgrade the graphics if we get some feedback from people who enjoyed the game. Hope it will bring some sweet memories, help you train that lazy eye 🙂 and hope you will enjoy it as much as we did doing the game jam!

As usual, if you want to be a part of our journey or want to give us a pat on the shoulder or tough love, or simply want to report a bug/crash, drop us a line! We would love to hear from you!